


Your Horoscope For Today

by menami



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Birthdays, Fluff, Gen, Horoscopes, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-09
Updated: 2018-04-09
Packaged: 2019-04-20 20:50:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14269269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/menami/pseuds/menami
Summary: After a year of traveling with the Doctor, Donna feels they're missing something.





	Your Horoscope For Today

“One year.” Donna said as she strolled into the room, her eyes adjusting to the fake sunlight just in time to see the Doctor flinch in response.

“What?” He looked up at her from beside a strange plant that looked like a large, conicular succulent. He sucked some blood off his thumb.

“One year. I’ve been travelling with you for a whole year.”

“Really? How can you tell? Time on the TARDIS is-”

“Relative, yeah I know. But I’ve been keeping track. Everytime I go to bed, another tally mark. It’s been 52 weeks, 365 days. A whole year.”

“Amazing,” the Doctor huffed. “You’ve managed to somehow invent an even _more_ human-centric way of keeping time.”

“Oi!” She slapped his shoulder jokingly, before pausing to watch him work. With two hands, he dug through a section of the thick leaves, and picked out one that looked worse for wear, about the size of his hand. He tugged at it experimentally, but when it didn’t budge, he cut it with the clippers.

“I didn’t even know you had this room. Thought you didn’t care for gardening.” She scanned it carefully, taking in the vast collection of mostly-alien flora.

He shrugged, putting down the clippers on top of a small duffel bag. “It’s a hobby of mine.”

“You’ve got a lot of hobbies.”

He hummed, as if considering a response to that. Instead, he stood up and said, “How’d you even find me?”

“This was the first room I checked. I told you she likes me.” Donna gestured vaguely around her, the distant hum of the TARDIS the only reminder that they hadn’t left the ship.

“Yeah, she does.” He paused for a moment. “Has it been a good year, then?”

Donna pursed her lips. “It’s certainly been a year. We even went home to celebrate my birthday once! I’d say it qualifies as a year. But a good one..?”

The Doctor seemed to tense up, perhaps in worry.

“Of course it’s been a good year, you doofus.” She grinned as he relaxed. “But, it was missing one thing. Do you have a birthday, Doctor?”

“No. Well, maybe. I mean, I wasn’t born on Earth. I wasn’t even born.” Donna made a mental note to ask him what the hell that meant later, she knew if she asked now they’d never get back on topic. “I did spend some time living on Earth, but whether or not I ‘picked up’ a birthday back then, I doubt I’d even remember.”

Donna nodded, and then stepped over the bag to face the Doctor. Rising up on her toes, she cupped his face, then turned it one direction and then to the next. “Well, you look like an Aries to me. And you certainly act like one.”

The Doctor’s expression filled with bewilderment. “Uhm?”

“Astrology. Nerys was real into it. It’s an earth thing. But yeah, you’re an Aries.”

The Doctor rolled his eyes, picking up his bag and striding to the next weird plant. “I know what Astrology is, Donna. It’s a pseudoscience humans invented long ago that people still listen to, for some reason.”

“Oh, that’s _very_ Aquarius of you. But that’s alright! No horoscope is perfect. Maybe you’re a cusp.”

The Doctor stopped in his tracks. “You can’t be an Aries Aquarius cusp. That’s not how that works.”

“Hey! Maybe it does in some space horoscope.” The Doctor’s sigh was his only answer. “Anyway, I’ve got to go.”

The Doctor quirked his brow. “Where’re you off to, then?”

“I’ve got plans!” She whipped out her phone, already on her way out.

“Plans? We’re in the middle of the Time Vortex? Where are you going?” His questions got no answer as she strolled out into the sci-fi hallway, tapping numbers furiously onto her universally-upgraded phone. Once it started to trill, she held it up to hear and was pleasantly surprised by how quickly the line picked up.

“Donna? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong, Martha don’t worry. Tell me, what’s the date over there?”

 

The Doctor was chewing his lip lightly and squinting at the monitor when Donna strolled in next. He’d say he wasn’t sure how long it’d been, but he was completely certain -- it’d been two days, four hours, and thirteen minutes. Donna liked the downtime sometimes as much as the adventures, so it wasn’t so strange to not see her for that long, but it did make him nervous.

Not that he’d admit that, of course.

“What’re you doing over there, spaceman? Plotting coordinates?”

“Checking my horoscope.”

Donna hesitated for a long moment. “Excuse me?”

“‘Aries: Today you will face great excitement, and something unexpected.’ Then there’s some stuff about compatibility with other signs and which signs I should… ah.” He stuck out his tongue. “But other than that, it seems pretty good!”

He stood up straight and grinned at Donna, who still looked fairly stunned. “You get the internet on that- no, nevermind, what _date_ is that from?”

“Uhh, it looks like,” he scrolled up with a knob on the side of the monitor, “April 9th, 2018.”

“That’s like, ten years in my future!”

“So? These things are fake anyway.” He whacked the screen gently and it went black. “Anyway. You ready to go?”

Donna blinked, before nodding. “Actually, I’ve got a request. April 18th, _2009,_ and this address.” She handed him a slip of paper hastily torn off of a legal pad with a location scribbled into it.

The Doctor studied the paper for a second. “Earth, right?”

“Yes, Earth, you numbskull.”

“Hey, you gotta be more specific in this business, Donna. There are plenty of Londons.”

“Well, I’m talking about _my_ London,” she specified as she watched him type in some coordinates and twirl some knobs. “London, Earth, the Solar System, er- the Milky Way. The London you always seem to mess up when I’m not looking.”

The Doctor didn’t bother to grace that with a dignified answer, simply a snicker seemed to suffice for him.

“Alright, all set. Ready to go, Donna?”

She grabbed onto the guardrails, as according to routine. “Whenever you are, Doctor.”

When he pulled the lever, the ride was just as bumpy as usual. And when it settled, Donna pulled herself up from the floor and skipped to the door quicker than the Doctor had ever seen her do before.

He smiled thinly, striding over to the door. “What’s got you all giddy, then?”

She grinned in response, and as soon as he was near, she pulled the doors open with gusto. “Happy birthday!” she yelled.

And the ground outside shook, and the branches of the trees swayed heavily, and the birds scattered and there was nobody in sight. The Doctor grinned. “What a wonderful present!”

Once the shaking had stopped, the forest in front of them really was beautiful. But it wasn’t London. “This is not where I told you to land, Doctor!”

“I guess not,” he laughed. “Must’ve entered a number or two wrong. But while we’re here, we might as well look around, right? Aren’t you the slightest bit curous?”

The look Donna gave him radiated such a powerful aura of exasperation, and the Doctor wondered if her horoscope could’ve predicted this.

 

“And- and then this _genius_ decides to _dare_ them to shoot him. He said triple-dog and everything!”

Martha smiled from behind her cup of tea. “Good to know he doesn’t change.”

The Doctor pouted. “It’s not like I was seriously hurt. And, it solved the problem, right?”

Donna eyed the gauze taped onto the Doctor’s cheek, and shoved a bit more cake into her mouth. “I still don’t know how you managed to fake hemophilia,” she said once she had hastily swallowed the cake.

“It’s not hard, really! I’ve got a lot more control over my immune system than a human would, so I can just sort of tell my blood not to clot. It’s a pain to get it going again, though.” He smiled as he picked off a slice of strawberry, licking the frosting off of it and continuing to consume his cake in the oddest fashion possible.

“So, you managed to stop a war by pretending a scrape on your cheek was fatal? How does that work?” Martha asked.

“To be honest? No clue. Most of their communications were telepathic, I think. Either that or they just stared a lot. My guess was they didn’t like involving outsiders in their fight. Some kind of war crime.”

“I thought you were telepathic.”

“Just a bit!” the Doctor lied. “It’s hard to focus it when you’re pretending to be bleeding to death.”

Donna frowned, the small bit of guilt twisting around again. “Some awful birthday, then, huh?”

He looked at her in confusion, his brown eyes wide like a child’s. “What do you mean? This was great! Adventure  _and_ cake! I love cake! Besides, isn’t that what my horoscope said? Something unexpected and exciting?”

Donna shoved him lightly. “That’s just everyday for you.”

He shoved her back with a smile. “I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

**Author's Note:**

> i just wanted to write donna throwing a party for ten! i love these dorks. also, partially inspired by some discord shenanigans with horoscopes.
> 
> my tumblr is [@doctormarz!](http://doctormarz.tumblr.com/)  
> [buy me a ko-fi?](ko-fi.com/menami)


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